It is common practice to use relative paths for file IO in game applications. Some games write saves and logs to the user’s home directory using an absolute path, but the game’s resources generally reside in the subdirectories beneath the application, if not on removable media such as a CD or DVD. Usually, relative paths […]
Policies are a powerful technique to use for some class designs. It’s a well known solution in C++, but someone coming to D may run into wrinkles using certain variations of the technique. I recently posted two entries (1, 2) on my D blog showing two ways to implement policies in D. Templates in D […]
The Java APIs have a plethora of exception classes, many of which you will find fit your own purposes (particularly some of those in java.lang). Prior to the introduction of chained exceptions in 1.4, it wasn’t uncommon for Java programmers to implement their own exception classes that supported chaining and derive all context-specific exceptions from […]
In a recent discussion at GameDev.net regarding art content in indie development, I was quite surprised at the number of people advocating getting the art into the game as soon as possible. I’m guessing most of the posters in that thread haven’t carried a major indie project through to completion yet, but it still brings […]
Indie game developers constantly debate the issue of piracy prevention. Search for ‘piracy’ in the indiegamer.org forums and you’ll find several threads espousing different views. The developer of the indie game Lux has taken an interesting approach. On his website he has a page designed to show up when would-be pirates search for cracks to […]